Reading DailyKos isn't like interacting in the real world. Indeed, DailyKos, per Demographic Tuesdays, is largely young, well-educated, male, white, and well-off. The rest of the United States, by and large, not so much.
So as Obama supporters wring their hands over the cruel and evil Hillary Clinton and her nefarious "Rovian" tactics (such as airing a commercial that didn't even mention Obama by name), it's worthwhile to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, particularly in terms of who would do better in a general campaign.
Now the first thing to do, of course, is to discount recent polls. The media has pretty much fawned over Obama for the past 2 months. And the focus of the media has been on the Democratic primary race; the GOP focus less so. So of course national polls taken during the heat of the Democratic primary will show the front runners garnering significant votes to beat McCain, particularly for Obama.
Now the thing to do is to look at the voting margins in some of the swing states, notably New Mexico, Florida, Nevada, and Ohio. (Sorry folks, Mississippi just isn't a swing state.) (And, yes, I realize that Florida wasn't "official", but, given its huge population of hispanics, it would probably remain >+10 for Clinton.) In all of these, Clinton trounced Obama among older voters, hispanics, and, in the case of Ohio, among a large fraction of the US: white, blue-collar voters.
Indeed:
The white, blue-collar voters personified by the 1970s fictional television character [Archie Bunker] cost Obama yesterday. His Democratic presidential rival, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, beat him 54 percent to 44 percent in industrial Ohio, and 58 percent to 40 percent in heavily Catholic Rhode Island.
[...]
The weak showing among the white working class in Ohio and Rhode Island reflects a larger vulnerability for Obama, said Joe Trippi, a former senior strategist for John Edwards, who had broad appeal among those voters until he dropped out of the Democratic race last month.
Obama, 46, has ``had a problem with lower-income, downscale, blue-collar Democrats from the beginning,'' Trippi said. ``He typically appeals to better educated, upscale Democrats.''
Obama has a blue-collar problem. And, as has been well-documented, he also has a Hispanic problem. For whatever reason, Hispanics break strongly for Hillary Clinton; and, in the general, who will they vote for when John McCain trots out his amnesty plan that got so much attention in the past?
How can Obama put together a winning general election strategy that doesn't include Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico?